Edited! Upgrading my existing PC now instead of buying a new one!

catlou

HUGE THANKS! am all done now Closed.:D I can really notice a difference now.

Spud17 It's ok I don't think that's condescending. I'm very grateful for the help as I wouldn't have had a clue where to start by myself, and really appreciate people Closed especially giving up their time to help me! It's also good to learn new stuff as I am interested in techie stuff and I feel a bit proud that I did it myself albeit with LOTS of help!

The terminal service thing is set to manual.

I'm going to leave it as it is for a few weeks then prob after xmas may consider adding ram? I will play with IE/firefox to see which is the fastest although I don't have many plug in's in firefox.

I'm defo going to buy an external hard-drive to backup. Is seagate a good/reliable brand as I had never heard of them!? Also I was going to get the 320gb one as it's a few quid cheaper than 500gb, I'm assuming that it would be more than enough space as my hard drive is 160gb but only about 40% full?

closed

320 is fine - maxblast backups are compressed anyway, so you can backup the machine several times before filling it up. Seagate/Maxtor is one of the big disk manufacturers, should be fine, but never put all your eggs in one basket, keep originals on the laptop hard disk, maxblast backup on usb hd, and a third copy of really important data to dvd

what's the commit charge now.

To reiterate spud17's comment, for a novice, you did really well - the trick now is to keep it clean

catlou

Thanks Closed!

Just a query I have been having a new "issue" with my broadband since I finished the "tuning".

It's prob just a coincidence......but I will ask anyway! Basically although my broadband is connecting and working ok - it's constantly showing the status as "Acquiring network address" never had this before?

Do you think it's anything to do with the settings I have changed?

closed

Don't think anything networky was touched apart from these

Network Location Awareness (NLA)
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper

Can't see them affecting it, but you could try starting the services again to see if it goes away

Is it the wired connection or the wireless connection that's acquiring a network address?

Could you post the results of a

ipconfig /all

from the cmd prompt box

What are the commit charge figures now?

catlou

Thanks Closed for your Fast answer!

I have started the services again and it seems to be all ok at the moment.

I'm off now - I will get back to you about the commit charge!

catlou

Hi!

Meant to reply sooner - had a funny couple days!

It was my wireless broadband but it seems to be fine since I changed the settings back so I will leave it like that.

I can really notice the difference in speed if anything it has made me realise that it was probably a bit slower than I thought in the first case!!

Commit Charge
Total 519688
Peal 592464

Seems to have crept up a bit already!

Ordered my Seagate Hardrive just waiting for it to arrive now!

closed

If stopping one of those services really caused the problem, then the other one doesn't need to be enabled (and use memory), should be easy to test by stopping the service temporarily.

Obviously the more you have running, the more ram will be used, you can see how much in task manager, processes, and by selecting view peak mem usage, to see which application grabs the most.

keep your "clean" log to compare with what you have in future, as you install bit's and pieces

closing the ati control panel might free some up, try right clicking or killing the process

catlou

Thanks Closed for all the help and advice you have given.:T

I have now received the Seagate Hardrive and done a back up disk imaging with the software you linked to. I had a quick look at the files on the external hardrive and everything seems to be there, the only thing I was wondering about is does it copy all my sent/received emails from Thunderbird as that would be really useful?

If I do it again in a month say do I need to delete it and do a whole new one or is the software clever enough to just copy the new things/difference?

Feels really good to have done it much better for "peace of mind!" :)than just the photos/docs on a memory stick although I will keep doing that too as my other copy.

THANK YOU!

closed

if you used disk imaging software, it should backup everything including mail messages stored on the hard disk, windows, programs, the lot.

Until the usb disk starts to get full, it's safer to give the next backup a new filename, eg the date, so you can recover to different points in time. Maxblast doesn't do differential or incremental backups, so it will do everything each time.

There is nothing stopping you copying photo's and data into a folder on the usb disk too, as they are slightly easier to access as files than in the maxblast image format. DVD's are safer than usb sticks for your secondary backup